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A growing refrain out of Syria is that widespread rape is taking
place—and sanctioned by the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

But when WhoWhatWhy examined the allegations, it found that
well-intentioned women’s groups trying to document and prevent
such abuses may be falling victim to a deliberate disinformation
campaign intent on rallying public support for toppling Assad.

If so, this would not be the first time false or exaggerated
allegations involving women or children were used to generate
public anger and build support for military action. This is a
particularly effective and cynical approach—in part because it
appeals to the very constituencies most resistant to war and its
toll: women and human rights advocates.

While rape is horrifically common throughout the world, and more
so in conflict zones, so, too, are “psychological operations”
intended to shape perceptions and outcomes. Many regimes,
particularly authoritarian and totalitarian ones, lie routinely
to their people, but as the purported exemplars of high standards
of truthfulness and accountability, the United States, Britain
and their allies are expected to uphold those values.

Fomenting public outrage is hardly a new thing. Hitler used it to rally the German people. But it
is not just genocidal maniacs abroad who manipulate public
sentiment. Widespread opposition to US entry into World War I was
overcome through an extensive range of propaganda efforts,
including untrue stories of German soldiers bayoneting babies.
Ironically and tragically, when credible indications of the Nazi
death camps arrived in the United States, the government did
nothing, the media punted, and the public, in part
because of prior untruths, remained skeptical.

During the first Gulf War, a Kuwaiti princess appearing in the
guise of an ordinary, anonymous eyewitness, appeared before
Congress and told false stories of Iraqi soldiers killing
newborn babies by taking them out of incubators. These stories,
concocted by a publicity firm tied to the George H.W. Bush
administration, were cited by senators supporting an invasion of
Iraq. In 2011, we were told that Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi had “ordered” mass rape.

In the Iraqi case, more people heard the original charges than
the later corrections. In the Libyan case, the media simply
reported the original allegations but failed to report that no
corroboration had ever emerged. The allegations simply vanished.

The Allegations

Because we had written early and often about rape allegations in Libya, we
wondered if similar claims might surface in Syria as well. We did
not have to wait long to find out. In the summer of 2011, one of
the first claims came from Oliver North of Iran-Contra Scandal
fame, in a syndicated column that provided no support for
the assertion that:

In Syria, Bashar Assad’s violently repressive regime continues a
vicious campaign of rape, plunder and murder orchestrated by the
Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps in an effort to retain control
over the Syrian people.

A UN report on human rights violations in
Syria last fall repeated several witnesses’ claims that security
officials had warned them their female relatives would be raped
if they did not cooperate. It also cited several allegations that
men were anally raped with batons and boys raped by security
officials. Given the police baton rape of Rodney King in Los
Angeles as well as the conviction of Penn State assistant
football coach Jerry Sandusky for repeated acts of “deviant
forcible sexual intercourse” with minor males, and a related
coverup by the university, as well as human rights group reports
on the frequency of prison rape in the United States—to say
nothing of within the US military—Americans well know
that such acts can take place anywhere. But because the Assad
regime is notably cruel and corrupt does not in itself tell us
that Assad would see a campaign of sexual terror as useful when
he is already struggling to maintain public support.

The UN report, interestingly, made no mention of widespread
organized rape of women.

Nonetheless, an organized, calculated, Syrian government rape
operation was portrayed recently in numerous news outlets,
including The Atlantic. Here’s how the US-based
international news website Global Post headlined it:

New project charts rape in Syria

A new project tracks reports of sexualized violence in
Syria, where attacks are usually carried out by regime
forces.

Of particular interest is the subheadline, saying that sexual
attacks are “usually carried out by regime forces.”

In the case of Libya, wide coverage of similar allegations was
quickly followed by a growing Western chorus for the ouster of
Muammar Qaddafi. But once Qaddafi had been ousted by a huge
international military effort, we no longer heard a peep about
those allegations—nor saw proof that they were accurate. And now,
with Syria an urgent priority and Western countries struggling to
overcome Russian and Chinese opposition to intervention, the echo
is loud indeed.

Rape allegations represent a separate and powerful appeal to
emotion, distinct from charges of massacres. The Western media
also carried unverified accounts of Qaddafi’s forces committing
massacres of unarmed civilians that were never borne out and
seldom publicly corrected. Meanwhile, more recent allegations
that rebel Libyan forces—rather than Qaddafi’s—had committed
massacres have not been investigated by the new Libyan
authorities, who, after all, represent the victorious rebels.

Recently, as we noted here and here, early reports suggesting that Syria’s
Assad and his force were solely or principally responsible for
massacres of men, women and children have been negated by partial
retractions—though anecdotal evidence suggests that many more
heard and still believe the original claims than the subsequent
cautionary reports.

Recently, defectors, a growing tool in the propaganda arsenal,
have been cited warning that Assad has and will use chemical
weapons—again, a story famously and falsely utilized to build support for
intervention in Iraq. For its part, the Syrian regime, well aware
that it is losing the war of words and of how this could be used
to justify another NATO bombing campaign as in Libya, has taken
the atypical step of publicly promising that its chemical weapons
stores are secure and will not be used against the insurgents or
Syrian civilians. It has, however, just announced that it would consider itself
entitled to use it against foreign invaders—a clear warning that
it expects but hopes to discourage NATO from doing what it did to
Qaddafi.

A Story Fit For the Tabloids

The new rape allegations have a particular, horribly evil story
line, beyond the magnitude of “normal” awfulness.

A Syrian girl remembers being kidnapped and kept in an apartment
with other young girls. Each day, people in charge of the units
would inject the girls’ thighs with an unknown substance, leaving
them paralyzed. With the girls unable to move, they were then
raped by security forces. In one instance, the girl recounted a
soldier burning her genitals with a hot iron. The horrific story
is one of many now recorded and posted online by Women Under Siege, an initiative
by the Women’s Media Center.

Could all this be true?

Having not heard of Women Under Siege, we at WhoWhatWhy decided
to check out the organization, contact it, and seek more details.

A note uploaded to a personal Facebook page written by an engineer describes
multiple instances of rape as gathered by a Syrian expatriate and
her husband who traveled to Jordan to meet with rape survivors.
The couple said they met with the women in two apartments being
rented by Saudi individuals to serve as shelters for rape
victims.

The couple said they spoke to 17-year-old girl who was raped and
kidnapped when her family’s home was searched. The girl was
subsequently “moved from one apartment to another for 15 days.
Every apartment was guarded and had a woman responsible for five
to 10 girls in the apartment. Every day, the girls were injected
with a substance in their thighs, after which they became unable
to move, and the shabiha [plainclothes militia forces] would rape
them.”

During one rape, the girl told the couple, she was tied,
undressed, and her genitals, including the inside of her vagina,
were burned with a hot iron. She said she passed out and awoke
later at a Syrian detention center in Damascus known as the
Palestine Security Branch.

Upon her release, she escaped to Jordan, where she has since
undergone “multiple reconstructive surgeries,” she said. She is
reportedly suffering lasting effects from the unidentified
substance that was injected into her thighs, including visible
injection sites and a blood disorder.

When we went to the facebook page cited, we found it was from a
man named Hadi Al Bahra. Al Bahra’s personal facebook page shows
that he is a male, from Damascus, Syria— but is based in Jeddah,
Saudi Arabia. Al Bahra is the General Director of Saudia Online, a portal for all things Saudi.
Saudi Arabia, a country with its own abominable record on
treatment of women and human rights generally,
is a leading advocate for military intervention to overthrow
Assad.

More on Al Bahra here: He was born in Syria, and migrated to the US
at 18, decades ago.

We contacted Mr. Al Bahra by email, seeking to interview him, but
he did not respond.

***

Beyond that very vague “report” from Saudi Arabia, we know
nothing. We don’t know who the “Syrian expatriate” and her
husband are. We have no way of knowing that they exist, and if
they do, that they actually told Al Bahra the story posted on the
Women Under Siege website. Even if they did, we don’t know that
they are telling the truth. Even if they are, we don’t know that
whoever told them that story was telling them the truth. And even
if everyone is telling the truth, it still doesn’t mean that
Bashar Assad is behind a campaign of deliberate sexual
brutalization—or that such claims should be the basis for massive
foreign military power to effect regime change in Syria.

Just a caveat, always needed in such articles: Assad is a brutal
dictator, as exist throughout the world—and he and his family
have been behaving brutally for decades. There is no particular
evidence that his regime is demonstrably more vicious than it has
ever been, excepting for his use of his military to suppress a
foreign-backed domestic uprising at all costs. Any fair
comparison would have to take into account the amount of
firepower, the fatalities and casualties incurred by Western
military campaigns in places ranging from Vietnam to Iraq.

There also is no history of the United States and its allies
insisting that other brutal, authoritarian (but allied) regimes
such as those in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Yemen and the Gulf States
also abdicate.

Dr. Malaz Alatassi, a founder and board member of the Syrian
Sunrise Foundation, a nonprofit humanitarian aid organization
based in the U.S., testified at the European Parliament on April
23, 2012, about atrocities in Syria.

Alatassi reports that he has spoken with a female physician in
Damascus who says she is treating some of the 2,000 girls and
women raped throughout Syria who have come to Damascus seeking
support. The youngest was a 7-year-old girl who died on the
operating room table, he said. Many women are pregnant and/or
have tested HIV-positive, according to Alatassi. There is not
enough medical, psychological, or social support to treat the
women’s needs, he said, adding that many have lost husbands or
parents.

WhoWhatWhy looked into the nonprofit humanitarian aid
organization founded by Dr. Alatassi, the Syrian Sunrise
Foundation. You can find the articles of incorporation of the
Foundation here. It was incorporated in Delaware—a
low-disclosure state more typically favored by for-profits than
non-profits.

The incorporator of the foundation was Asim Ghafoor of Sterling,
Virginia. Ghafoor has been in the news in the past. He was
political director of the now-defunct Islamic Free Market
Foundation, cofounded by Grover Norquist, the influential GOP
operative. Ghafoor, an attorney, was a partner in a consulting
firm that advertised good connections with US Homeland Security
(and for a time had a Redskins game skybox for rubbing elbows with
bigwigs), though he also represented various charitable entities
that were investigated for alleged terrorist ties.

We emailed and later spoke with Alatassi. We asked him if he
could put us in touch with the Syrian doctor cited in his report.
He said that he would pass along our request for a Skype conversation. We did not hear back from
the doctor or Alatassi.

In an interview, Gloria Feldt, a former president of Planned
Parenthood and a member of the Women’s Media Center’s board of
directors, said it was her understanding that the Syria project
was an indirect outgrowth of conversations between Steinem and
the author of a book about sexualized violence in the Holocaust.
She said Steinem was struck by how “sexualized violence had
gotten no recognition as one of tools of repression and
genocide.” Apparently, with Syria the current top story about
war, the organization thought it would be an ideal place to
document the role of sexual violence there. (Steinem herself was
on a writer’s retreat and, according to her office, unavailable
for comment.)

Seeking to establish where Women Under Siege gets its Syria
information, we contacted Lauren Wolfe, the young journalist
running it. She referred us to Karestan Koenen, a Columbia University epidemiologist who has
taken the lead on the information collection. Koenen herself was
a victim of a brutal rape—not in Syria, but as a
volunteer for the US Peace Corps in Niger. She is one of several
women who came forward to reveal that the Corps
sought to suppress the story of how its own employees were
victims while working in largely friendly countries. (President
Obama has signed legislation to provide additional
protections.)

We spoke to Koenen while she was attending a conference in
Brussels. Koenen made clear that the group’s information is
almost entirely second- or third or fourth-hand and largely comes
from unverified web postings. “The overall goal of the project is
to map in real time alleged sexual assaults in Syria,” she said.
“The reports we have thus far are mostly identified through
researchers and activists who do systematic searches of the
web—Google, YouTube, etc. Most results are from that. Some
are from human rights groups, some from journalists.” Koenen
noted that a very few of the allegations have been emailed to
them from individuals claiming direct knowledge.

She readily conceded that there is no way to know who is taking
the time and effort to create such web postings. Presumably it is
not victims themselves. And she agreed that such claims should be
treated with caution. She did, however, note that it is difficult
to obtain accurate, documented information in real time, and that
waiting until the conflict is over is also not a viable option.

As for the trends from the inputs, Koenen says, “In the vast
majority of reports we’ve received—about 70 percent, the
perpetrators are government forces. The fact we haven’t received
so many reports about the [opposition] Free Syrian army doesn’t
mean they haven’t committed rapes. We have gotten a few.”

Koenen told us that her boss, Wolfe, was imminently due to speak
about rape in Syria on a panel at the United Nations, shortly
before the Security Council was to take yet another vote on
whether to dramatically increase sanctions against Assad.

Because of Russian and Chinese objections, the Security Council
did not approve those sanctions. But the United States and its
allies made clear they intend to go forward with toppling Assad, and
do not need UN acquiescence. As the New York Times noted:

“We’re looking at the controlled demolition of the Assad regime,”
said Andrew J. Tabler, a Syria expert at the Washington Institute
for Near East Policy.

Source: Lieberman and McCain?

One of the early and leading claimants for mass rape in Syria is
Sen. Joseph Lieberman, a member of the Armed Services Committee
and a strong supporter of US military interventions in Iraq and
Libya. He, along with his friend John McCain, has been in the
forefront of pushing for US military
participation in support of the uprising against Assad.

And as Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental
Affairs Committee, Lieberman declared: “We like to do
legislation,” Lieberman said. “We don’t like investigating … just
to see who is at fault.”

Far fewer people who are reading the headlines about Assad being
behind mass rapes are likely to read this caveat on the Women Under Siege site:

The thing is, rape is nearly impossible to confirm. …

[Snip]

When documenting rape, as in anything, you have to evaluate your
source: Is this coming directly from the woman who was violated?
From her cousin? Her cousin’s friend? In the case of Syria, many
stories are coming from that cousin’s friend. Or from the
cousin’s friend who “heard about” a friend of his brother’s
sister…etc. Right now, Syria is a convoluted black hole
of second- and third-hand reporting that few conflict
zones can rival in recent history.

The sources reporting rape directly to our crowdmap or via news
outlets vary: Fathers speak out for their daughters, doctors for their patients, and, perhaps most
surprisingly, many of our reports are sourced from former Syrian
army soldiers admitting (forcibly? We can’t know) the crimes they
have committed. It’s a sinkhole of
fact-checking. But, for the sake of our humanity, we
believe we have to mark all of this down and try.

In our interview, Women Under Siege’s Koenen noted: “We have no
evidence there are orders [by Assad] to do this. It seems
to be widespread, in over a dozen locations, but at this point I
wouldn’t be able to say.” And, asked about whether there is
something unique about what is alleged in Syria that would make
this a special case for military intervention, including a
probable bombing campaign and all that entails, she said: “We
don’t have a sense whether sexual violence is more common in this
conflict than in others.”

For more on rape as a worldwide problem (including the fact that
eighteen percent of women in the United States have been victims
of rape or attempted rape), see this.

Finally, in order to advance the public interest, WhoWhatWhy
makes this offer: We are a small nonprofit with limited
editorial resources. But if someone of substantial means (though
no agenda) will step forward to fund it, WhoWhatWhy will put a
team in-country in Syria and try to establish whether the
headlines accurately portray what is going on. We promise to
report, fairly, whatever we find.

# #

WhoWhatWhy plans to continue doing this kind of
groundbreaking original reporting. You can count on it. But can
we count on you? We cannot do our work without your support.